Ringtonium: Ringtone Creation Done Right

If you’re like me, you spend way too much time customizing your smartphone with launchers, widgets, wallpapers and icons. And why not? With custom interface elements, our phones look cooler than when we took them out of the box. But how about getting them to sound better too?

Enter Ringtonium Pro. It’s a well designed workspace to create ringtones with, whether it’s for calls, messages or Facebook notifications. The app isn’t just all about looks though, and comes with some clever controls for precise editing. But is it worth the money? Let’s find out.

Ringtonium has a gorgeous, easy-to-use interface

Overview

Ringtonium Pro allows you to create ringtones for calls, alarms and notifications using audio tracks on your device or high-quality recordings. It requires Android 2.1 or newer to run, and costs $1.99 in the Play Store. There’s also a free version in case you want to just try the app or aren’t a frequent user.

Ringtonium allows you to record high-quality audio to work with

Getting Started

There are two ways to create a ringtone with this app: you can use a audio file stored on your phone or record a new one from scratch. If you choose the former, Ringtonium will automatically list all the compatible files it can work with for you to pick from; if you choose to record something, Ringtonium will capture high-quality audio (presumably in WAV) for you to work with.

Making and tweaking a selection is easy

The Interface

Ringtonium is very thoughtfully designed and even has a simple built-in tutorial to guide you on how to use it. With its skeuomorphic design elements and well-executed wood, metal and plastic textures, it looks like a premium iOS app. While I’m usually not a fan of such interface designs, it works well here because it combines functionality with aesthetics quite well.

After you’ve recorded a clip or selected a track to edit, the audio will be loaded on the editing screen, which is laid out with a scrolling waveform representation of the track, along with sliders to make a selection, a wheel to fine-tune your selection (up to 0.01 second), playback and repeat buttons, and tabs to switch to the Effects and Save screens.

Adding fades to your tracks is a snap

Creating a Ringtone

Ringtonium has, by far, the best controls for selecting part of a track to use as your ringtone: simply navigate on the waveform to the part of the track that you want to use, toggle the sliders on and adjust, and finally, fine-tune your selection using the highly accurate wheel. You can then preview your selection, set it to repeat, or choose to add effects.

There are essentially four effects: fade in, fade out (up to two seconds each), normalization, and gate (which creates a periodical clipping of the sound, so to speak). While these are easy to use, they aren’t as much fun as some of the other effects available in the iOS version. Once you’re done with these, you can move on to the Save screen.

You can save your edited audio as a music track, a ringtone for all incoming calls or for a specific contact, an alarm or a notification tone. What’s pretty interesting here is that when you record audio, Ringtonium seems to record uncompressed audio and then saves it as an MP3, which is great.

Save your creation as a ringtone, alarm or notification

Pro vs. Lite Editions

There’s unfortunately not much of a difference between the paid and free versions of Ringtonium — the $1.99 only removes ads and adds two basic effects (normalization and gate) which I doubt anyone will really miss. However, it’s clear that a lot of hard work has gone into designing and building the app, and so you may opt to pay for the Pro version just to support the developers.

Conclusion

Ringtonium is a must-have for those who like to customize their smartphone interfaces, and is a treat for those who enjoy well designed apps. It’s also much more usable than its main competitor Ringdroid, offering better control over your selections and higher-quality recordings to work with.

I would’ve liked to have seen more effects, a few free custom tones and perhaps some sound clips to append to tracks, for this price. Still, this is a top-notch app that’s worthy of being pre-installed on upcoming devices. If you’re in the market for a ringtone creation tool that gets the job done, look no further than Ringtonium.